JavaPolis 2006 - Day 4: Boring?

As much as I liked the previous three days of JavaPolis, today was actually a little bit disappointing. For some of the session slots I had a hard time picking one, and most of the sessions I attended today didn't really match up to my expectations.

The keynote was quite a disaster. Marc Fleury from JBoss appeared as some sort of a drag queen presenting some very shallow stuff on professional open source. The second part of the keynote was a very boring and tedious 30 minutes about the RAD Race that took place on Tuesday. Although I'm actually quite interested in what kind of tools were used an stuff like that the organisor of the RAD Race decided to take about 29 minutes and 50 seconds to brag about himself and how challenging the RAD Race is. Actually, it was exactly the same 29 minutes and 50 seconds that he presented last year. Argh! The third and last part of the keynote was a talk by Erich Gamma titled 'Java from the trenches' on the process behind he Eclipse success story. Unfortunatelly for me, it was exactly the same talk as he did at JavaOne, so no new stuff for me there. So reading this stuff you can probably imagine I was actually quite relieved when the keynote was finally over.

On a more positive note though, my JavaPolis day 2 review blog post made it once again into the JavaPolis daily newspaper. Unfortunatelly it's also the final edition of the newspaper, so much for my two minutes of fame. 🙂

What really made up for my unlucky pick of sessions today was the amount of former coworkers that I met today. I met some people that I had not seen in quite some years. It appeared as a lot of people just came to JavaPolis for a single day. The pavilion floor but also the sessions were really crowded today.

Possibly the biggest deception of it all was the final talk of the day by Rod Johnson on the Spring Framework 2.0. In the past I've made no secret out of not liking Spring very much. In my opinion it is simply no good. I can't understand why you would even consider using it. The talk by Rod was about everything I needed to confirm my beliefs again. This guy is so arrogant, unbelievable. I think the current plans for Spring 2.0 and beyond outline this as well. It's a world domination story, insulting each and everyone that thinks otherwise.

With the bad taste from the Spring session in my mouth it was time for another highlight, being the JavaPolis movie. Casino Royale was screened in the Metropolis THX theatre and although this blog is not about movie reviewing I found it a very entertaining, must see movie!

So much for day 4 coverage. Tomorrow is the final day and although there is not whole lot of sessions I managed to find some very interesting topics.

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